The Death of Reality
by Gunduz Kalic

0n the second day of international media coverage after
a gunman killed 35 people in Port Arthur, Australia last
year, Dr. Park Deitz, the FBI’s leading consultant on
mass murder, told the London Times that TV coverage of a similar
tragedy in Dunblane, Scotland probably inspired this massacre
in Tasmania. Deitz figured that the Port Arthur killer realized
‘this man (the Dunblane killer) had a tremendous impact
on the whole nation . he probably thought to himself ‘I am
as powerful as he is. The world needs to know my suffering
and feel my rage.’

In Canada, Madean’s magazine reported recently that in
the 1990s the tenor of the TV debate has taken on a dark new
tone . . . much of the concern - fueled by a recent spate of
gruesome, lethal crimes by mere children - revolves around
TV violence.And in America, best-selling author John
Grisham created a furor a year ago when he accused the Oliver
Stone movie Natural Born Killers of directly triggering the
fatal murder of a 58.year-old man.

Worry about the deleterious effects of violent films,
videos and video games - and indeed, even the electronic
news - does seem to be growing. Yet our difficulty, perhaps,
lies in our considering violence make-believe only, in isolation
from the rest of the illusion saturating our lives.

This lingering disquiet of ours may be rooted in the fact
that these tragedies, like terrorist attacks, are not only acts of
violence, but acts of performance - for national and world
audiences. The men who made small towns in Scotland and
Australia household names round the world for a few weeks
last year are killers, yes, but also, appallingly, actors and stars.
Through a single, well-calculated act, an ordinary member of
the world audience can take global center stage; grasp
Andy Warhol’s 15 minutes of fame. And thereby rival the
greatest celebrities.

The simple fact is that little more than a century ago, most
people rarely watched plays. When they did, it was a big event
in their lives. Nowadays, we are utterly saturated with recreational
and commercial make-believe. Through technology,
entertainment of all kinds - including the news, lately called
infotainment - is available to us around the clock. This illusion
epidemic has caught us unawares - and is creating
problems and challenges for which we are unprepared.
The English drama theoretician and BBC producer Martin
Esslin has suggested that the exponential increase in the
usage of what he calls dramatic communication in modern
societies constitutes the most important social revolution
since Gutenberg introduced the printing press. Yet the fact that
each of us consumes a far heavier diet of illusion than our
ancestors did is rarely discussed.

What is the effect of massive, continuous, and ever more
powerfully realistic doses of make believe upon human
beings? My observation is that saturation levels of fiction tend
to turn audiences into actors in everyday life.

The aim of entertainment is to have us voluntarily suspend
our disbelief and make us imaginatively identify with some
part of the action. Traditionally, the closing of the curtains and
the raising of the lights served as an effective enough signal to
audiences that the time had come to return to reality.

Nowadays, the enormous increase in the sheer quantity of
performed make believe is inevitably causing us to carry bits
of the illusions we watch back into our own lives and behavior.
Filmmaker George Miller, of Mad Max and Babe fame, observes:
As a practicing storyteller, I could hardly fail to observe that
movies and TV impinge on behavior. . . if movies and television
influenced the way we talk, the way we move, the way weplay as children, how can we also say it doesn’t affect our
behavior at a moral or cognitive level? Obviously the degree
to which different people are affected at different times varies.
We may become caught up in a particular trend in dress - and
notice that we have done so. Or we may thoroughly immerse
ourselves in, for example, the Rocky Horror Picture Show cult.
Most of our identifications are harmless enough in themselves
most of the time. The problem lies in the fact that we are probably
affected much more often and more deeply than we know.

Definitely, the incessant volume of available illusion in our
society clearly triggers uncontrollable effects in some people -and
not only violence. Not least is that our perceptions are
often warped; illusion and reality blur together. Several years
ago, in the small town where I was living at the time, a suicidal
mother deliberately drove herself and her child off a bridge.
Some teenagers watching thought that they must be shooting
a film. When Ronald Reagan was shot early in his presidency,
the first reaction of one of his aides was to want to see the
replay. Following the Port Arthur massacre, survivors reported
that, at the same moment people were dying from the gun-man’s
bullets or running for their lives, they were laughing
because they though the whole thing was some kind of show.

Entertainment has become the latest and greatest drug of
choice. Audiences now pop the illusion tablet with hardly a
second thought, many times a day. Just imagine the ancient
Greeks watching their tragedies and comedies every day, all
day, throughout the year.

At key historical moments, societies have woken to
destructive or self-destructive practices and have begun the
long and arduous task of reversing the damage. Cigarette
smoking, racial prejudice and vilification, and child abuse are
recent examples. Now it is time to take a good, hard look at
the illusion industry’s open slather, which, unnoticed, has been
disintegrating individual and society alike.

Gunduz Kalic, a former professor in theater, is director of Taking
Liberties, Australia’s Court Jester a foolish, illusion-busting
theater company based in Brisbane. This article was written with
the help of company manager, Ian McNish.